We haven’t heard from Bono and Lady Gaga yet, so it is too early to say, but in
our age of second acts — WikiLeaks, Jane Fonda workouts, “Hawaii Five-O,” Jimmy
Carter (and isn’t the TV show “Dexter,” in which liberal frustration leads to weekly
ritual sacrifice by a serial killer, a redo of the very popular “Death Wish” in
1974?) — the Egyptian uprising appears to be a latte version of the Ayatollah
Revolution in 1979; but one without the Ayatollah. And without the American
hostages. The first brought Ronald Reagan from nowhere onto a steady trajectory
to the most successful presidency, perhaps, in the post-war period. Possibly we
will see that heartland instinct which emerged in the Reagan period awaken now
to dominance. Indeed, it is what we have been seeing with Tea Party,
Constitutional Conservatives, Sarah Palin, the “Ron Paul Revolution” and Judge
Andrew Napolitano these last two years. The key, in my mind, is one case rising
before the Supreme Court; the case of ObamaCare’s “individual mandate.” It will
determine America’s future.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto
today has a good analysis. “If the Supreme Court were to uphold ObamaCare, it
would mark a radical expansion of congressional power,” he writes. “The court
would have to find that Congress's authority ‘to regulate Commerce … among the
several States’ is so vast as to permit the enactment of laws forcing
individuals to transact business with private companies.”

The 26-state challenge to the “individual mandate” is itself a second act. The
first onslaught came when first lady Hillary Clinton led Congress to try for a
national healthcare bill in the first Clinton administration. It descended into
fiasco. But this time it was different. This time, under the good grace that
allowed up to 70 percent of the people to support Barack Obama when he was
running for president, Obama betrayed America’s good will to jam through this
bill via the dark quaternity: Frank, Pelosi, Reid, Obama. In a sterling moment
of character unprecedented in the post-war period, the people stood up and took
it back.

As Taranto writes, the Supreme Court has expanded congressional power before, but
in almost all such cases it was or at least seemed to be going with the
political grain. “By contrast, in upholding ObamaCare, the Supreme Court would
be validating an unprecedented congressional power grab while upholding a law
so at odds with the popular will that, to borrow the words of The New
Republic's Jonathan Cohn, ‘there was
something fundamentally illegitimate about the process that produced it.’ ”

If on the surface we are in late-70’s redux, our age has for the past decade brought
to my mind the mid-1800s and the shift from the Colonial Period to the rustic
Jacksonian era. In the people’s battle against the Obama Quaternity, the people
are winning. The passage of ObamaCare legislation by a Congress that had the
full support of 11 percent of Americans brings to mind the Fugitive Slave Act
passed by Congress in 1850, which compelled citizens of Northern states to act
against their conscience and help return escaped former slaves into bondage.

As Texas Gov. Rick Perry writes in his book, Fed Up!: Our Fight to
Save America from Washington, “while the
southern states seceded in the name of ‘states’ rights,’ in many ways it was
the northern states whose sovereignty was violated in the run-up to the Civil
War.”